We spoke to artist Britt Salt about her creative practice and the inspirations behind the work featured in our current exhibition Line/Loop/Line, on site at the Australian Tapestry Workshop until February 2024.

How did you get into making art?

Ever since I was a child I have been making and drawing. Whether on school holidays spending time at work with my Dad, a draftsperson, or at home using scraps of paper and drawing materials to entertain ourselves or helping my Mum make quilts, making art has been a part of my life since I was very young and it continues to be daily practice.

Who or what inspires you to create?

Inspiration for me can be as simple as the need to be "doing", I'm not very good at sitting still! So whilst at home I'll crochet a scarf, start drawing patterns or exploring materials lying around the house. This playing often evolves into much more complex and larger work and as it does, external influences become more prominent such as architecture, geometry, repetition, minimalism and artists such as Andrea Zittel, Anni Albers, Tauba Auerbach and Arakawa & Gins.

What does your practice involve – what techniques do you use in your work?

Slow, methodical and hand-crafted methods of weaving, drawing, and sculpture are used in my practice to map connections between real and imagined architectures. In my art practice, architecture is a methodology for exploring public and private space, internal and external worlds, and increasingly uncertain environments.

What does a day in the studio look like?

I'm very much a morning person, so each day starts early, I usually wake about 5:30am and get straight into the studio. I'm always working on something and like to have ongoing tapestries and drawings in the studio so that I can continually be working. And as Giles Delueze suggested, it is in the doing that we are thinking, I'm very much a process driven artist. Whilst working I like to listen to audiobooks and podcasts and can often be interrupted by my studio buddy, Ernie the miniature schnauzer!

How does your work in this exhibition relate to your practice and where it is heading?

The works that are showing at ATW, 'The Distance' and 'Neither Nor' are an exploration of in-between space - the unseen, the not quite here, not quite there, the middle distance. Methodically made and seemingly exact in creation, when the viewer looks closer the human hand is seen - there are glitches and slippages throughout these tapestries where yarn puckers and lines diverge from regular patterns. As my practice evolves I am continuing to explore how human actions influence seemingly rigid structures. How do human actions tweak or turn a rigid structure? How can a static grid, a loom, a city layout, or gallery diverge from constraint and become a space of potential for new creative thought? Does the loom need to remain static in the studio, or can it evolve and move, change and become a support for something new? Having just completed my Masters at the VCA, I'm bursting with ideas and excited to see where my practice heads next. I'll be showing at Linden Project Space in September 2024 alongside artists Shannon Slee and Helvi Apted.

‘Line/Loop/Line’ is open to the public to view 10am-5pm, Thursday – Saturday until 2 Feb 2024.

View the ‘Line/Loop/Line’ exhibition page here.